Genius: Peer-to-peer location-aware gossip using network coordinates

Abstract

The gossip mechanism could support reliable and scalable communication in large-scale settings. In large-scale peer-to-peer environment, however, each node could only have partial knowledge of the group membership. More seriously, because the node has no global knowledge about the underlying topology, gossip mechanism incurs much unnecessary network overhead on the Internet. In this paper, we present Genius, a novel peer-to-peer location-aware gossip. Unlike many previous location-aware techniques which utilize BGP or other router-level topology information, Genius uses the network coordinates map produced by Vivaldi as the underlying topology information. By utilizing the information, Genius could execute near-preferential gossip, that is, the node should be told the gossip message by nodes as close as possible, through which much unnecessary 'long-range' communication cost could be reduced. Further, the node direction information inherited in the coordinate space is exploited. We present preliminary experimental results which prove the feasibility of our scheme. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.